Source Description

Hannah Arendt, a
Jewish intellectual who had fled to the United States in
1941, wrote this field report during her first
trip back to Germany after the war. In contrast to her now famous
account “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule. Report from Germany,” her field report
directly mentions the circumstances which brought Arendt to Germany. She
traveled as an emissary for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction,
Inc. (JCR), an association of major Jewish organizations and
institutions founded in New York in 1947 which dealt with
the collection and restitution of looted Jewish cultural artifacts in
Europe
after the Second World
War.

In late 1949, Hannah Arendt traveled
to Germany
for four months, during which time she visited the British occupation zone
in order to survey restitutable cultural assets in the cities of Hamburg, Hannover,
Köln,
and Lübeck.
In Hamburg
in particular, she found numerous collections previously confiscated by the
Nazis whose legal heirs had yet to be determined.

During her trip,
Arendt wrote
five official reports for JCR which were distributed to all its board members once they
reached New
York. These were internal communications not intended to be
made public. They give an insight into the extent of Jewish organizations’
activities in dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust and attest to the
difficulty faced by Jewish advocates in their fight for the reinstatement of
the rule of law and justice after 1945.